New Delhi: Video analytics start-up Vidooly has raised $1.4 million from Gujarat Venture Finance Ltd, an Ahmedabad-based venture capital firm, and existing investor Times Internet to fund its expansion into Southeast Asian markets and hire more people.

The Noida-based firm, which tracks user engagement of videos on social media, plans to market the platform in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam with an ultimate goal to enter China by next year, co-founder and chief marketing officer Nishant Radia said in a telephonic interview.

“We are getting a lot of traction from South East Asian countries, so we will try to grow our foothold there. We will deploy sales and marketing staff in these areas,” Radia said.

The other half of the corpus will be invested towards technology upgradation and scaling of the platform, Radia said. Vidooly will hire about 15 personnel in data science and sales functions over one year. It currently has 35 employees.

Vidooly offers a video analytics and intelligence platform used by digital media portals, YouTube content creators, multi-channel networks and brands, for tracking how videos do on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Clients include marketing companies such as Group M and Mindshare, multi-channel operator Only Much Louder, media conglomerate Network18 and digital publishers ScoopWhoop, The Viral Fever, Video Gyan and The Quint, besides a host of independent YouTube content creators.

Using big data and statistical modelling, Vidooly delivers insights and data on video consumption patterns. The software suite also offers features like video tag suggestions, best time to upload, search rank analysis, competitor tracking, subscriber behaviour analysis and influencer collaboration.

Vidooly is offered as a software-as-a-service (Saas) platform for an annual subscription fee. It has over 200 paying customers.

Vidooly also brings out regular reports capturing top content creators on social media platforms, most-subscribed channels on YouTube, most-watched web series or ad campaign, among others.

The venture was started in August 2014, by Radia and Subrat Kar (now the chief executive of Vidooly), who met during their stint at e-commerce marketplace India Mart, and Ajay Mishra (chief technology officer at Vidooly).

The start-up was incubated at T-Labs, the accelerator programme managed by Times Group, and went on to raise $1 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and Times Internet (through T-Labs) in June 2015

Radia said the next step for Vidooly is to pitch the data analytics engines to over-the-top (OTT) video streaming platforms.

“Now we are expanding to OTT and the next target is tying up players like Netflix or Hulu. We will create an analytics dashboard specifically for these players that will give videos consumption data for use by companies and advertisers,” Radia said. “This will be a plug-and-play kind of service.”

ScoopWhoop, a leading news and entertainment portal, is developing a similar platform for clients running advertising campaigns on ScoopWhoop that will help them target users better.

With advertising money getting diverted to social media marketing, especially towards videos, platform like Vidooly are gaining interest from advertisers and publishers alike. According to a Group M report released in February, advertising spent on digital media channels in expected to grow 30% to Rs9,490 crore in 2017.